Science
grrlscientist | October 20, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) was just published recently. This edition is entitled Scientia Pro Publica -- 14th edition. The author of Genetic Interference is speaking (right now!) at the American Society of Human Genetics Annual Meeting and is planning to "live blog" that conference as well, despite the fact it's in Hawai'i, so be sure to poke around on his blog to find those essays.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a…
grrlscientist | October 19, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) was just published at Genetic Interference. This edition is entitled Scientia Pro Publica -- 14th edition. The author of Genetic Interference is speaking at the American Society of Human Genetics Annual Meeting and is planning to "live blog" that conference as well, despite the fact it's in Hawai'i, so be sure to poke around on his blog to find those essays.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a…
drorzel | October 19, 2009Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter, a Wired article and a research group website for the Stanford Study of Writing. As the Wired piece reports, the group has done a large study of student writing, and finds that modern college students write more and are better writers than students in the past.
This is a little hard to square with my personal experience (he says, procrastinating from grading a depressingly large stack of student lab reports), and that of many of the commenters at Wired. There are enough caveats in the description of the study that these needn't be contradictory, though that's…
awild | October 19, 2009
Formica obscuripes
Trophallaxis- the social sharing of regurgitated liquids- is a fundamental behavior in the biology of most ant colonies. One ant approaches another, asks for a droplet of food, and if her partner is willing the two spend anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes in what is best described as a myrmecological french kiss. The behavior is so central to the life of ants that the insects have an entire stomach, separate from their digestive gut, devoted as a reservoir for social sharing.
Although the act involves a transfer of food, it would be a mistake to think of…
drorzel | October 19, 2009It's hard to say exactly why I found Edward Carr's article on polymaths so irritating, but I suspect it was this bit:
The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks--policy or science--the experts start to erect barricades. "Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry," Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. "Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very…
catdynamics | October 18, 2009An interesting paper just out, suggests that modern financial instruments are computationally intractable: specifically finding that inverting the synthesis of CDOs is equivalent to finding whether there is a dense subgraph of the CDO graph.
Thus figuring whether CDOs are manipulated to dump bad collateral selectively on a subset of buyers is probably NP hard!
Ouch.
Paper is "Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products" by Arora, Barak, Brunnermeier and Ge (pdf)
Good discussion at Freedom to Tinker
If correct, then the current structure of Collateralized Debt…
bioephemera | October 18, 2009
Via Inventorspot: Hello Kitty goes anatomical, and we discover she even has bows on her guts. Yikes!
But seriously - the second, faux-ivory Hello Kitty looks a little familiar. According to Inventorspot,
you can choose from regular style or an interesting antiqued version with a finish resembling aged ivory. This style is meant to look like a netsuke; a polished and sculpted toggle worn by Japanese citizens and samurai on their kimono sashes from the 17th century on - robes have no pockets, y'see.
A netsuke? Sure. But to me, ivory + anatomy = anatomical teaching models like these. (see also…
bioephemera | October 18, 2009
From the NIDA media guide
Jared Diamond and the New Yorker's parent company have denied all charges in the "Vengeance is Ours" scandal:"
The defendants' attorneys listed 34 reasons, called "affirmative defenses," why they should prevail in the lawsuit. Among them are the contentions that the plaintiffs were not defamed and had not suffered any harm or actual injury to their reputations; that Diamond and The New Yorker had not acted with "actual malice" or with knowledge that The New Yorker story was false; that the article was "substantially true" and thus protected under the First and 14th…
grrlscientist | October 18, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
grrlscientist | October 18, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is almost here once more and it is still seeking submissions for tomorrow's edition of this blog carnival! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written blog essays to the host?
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The…
bioephemera | October 17, 2009
From Inhabitat: Artist Brandon Jon Blommaert's recycled trash robots (yes, they're real sculptures) lay waste to Photoshopped landscapes. Check out his flickr page for more - and a "making of" series of photos showing how he built these steampunky robot overlords, who are destined for a Canadian recycling center. Their message is clear: RECYCLE, HUMANITY, OR BE EXTERMINATED!
Thanks to reader Todd F. for the heads-up!
oracknows | October 17, 2009I knew it! I knew there had to be an explanation that young earth creationists could come up with for all that evidence in support of evolution:
(WARNING: Borderline NSFW, depending on your job. Definitely offensive to fundamentalists.)
It's so obvious. Why didn't I think of it before?
grrlscientist | October 17, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about science, nature or medicine lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival…
bioephemera | October 17, 2009
NPS Photo/Dan Stahler
This fall, Montana opened a sport hunting season - on wolves. Yeah - the same wolves that wildlife biologists have been working so hard (and spending lots of federal money) to successfully reintroduce to restore the Yellowstone ecosystem. So what happened? It really isn't that surprising: hunters have already killed nine wolves in the wilderness area near Yellowstone's northern border - including both the radio-collared alpha and beta females of Yellowstone Park's Cottonwood wolf pack. Uh. . . oops.
And what do Montana authorities have to say about this?
"Members of…
grrlscientist | October 16, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about science, nature or medicine lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival…
awild | October 16, 2009
Tetraponera merita Ward 2009, Madagascar
Tetraponera merita Ward 2009 is one of many aculeate species described in the pages of a new festschrift honoring Roy Snelling. I can't link to it, unfortunately, as the festschrift is printed the latest issue of the paper-only Journal of Hymenoptera Research.
All the same, if you can get your hands on a copy the effort is worth it, especially for a touching biography penned by Jack Longino and Roy's son, Gordon Snelling. The festschrift also holds a couple dozen articles spanning the ecology, chemistry, evolution, and systematics across a broad…
catdynamics | October 15, 2009Dear media,
The density of air is just over 1.2 kg per cubic meter. At about STP.
The density of helium is just under 0.2 kg per cubic meter.
A helium balloon can therefore lift about 1 kg per cubic meter.
There are about 30 cubic feet per cubic meter and just over two pounds per kg.
To lift a 50 pound load you therefore need about 750 cubic feet of helium filled balloon,
bit more allowing for envelope, rope, basket etc.
You do the math.
I hope they find that little kid in Colorado, and that he is very scared of his parents being angry with him.
This is allowing for buoyancy only, with wind…
bioephemera | October 15, 2009For all my microbiology/cell biology peeps, this could be a neat opportunity. ASCB has obtained a two-year stimulus grant from NIH to assemble an image library of the cell. According to Caroline Kane, project PI and professor emerita at UC-Berkeley (and a wonderful person/mentor),
"By visualizing the structure and dynamic behavior of a broad range of cells, scientists and clinicians will be better able to understand the nature of specific cells and cellular processes normal and abnormal. This will likely lead to new discoveries about diseases and drug targets in the future," Kane added. "I'm…
drorzel | October 15, 2009I gave a guest lecture this morning in a colleague's sophomore seminar class about time. She's having them look at time from a variety of perspectives, and they just finished reading Longitude, so she asked me to talk about the physics of clocks and the measurement of time.
I've long considered using "A Brief History of Timekeeping" as the theme for a general education course-- there's a ton of interesting science in the notion of time and timekeeping. This was just a single class, though, so I didn't go into too much detail:
A Brief History of Timekeeping
View more presentations from Chad…
pharyngula | October 15, 2009
It's yet another transitional fossil! Are you tired of them yet?
Darwinopterus modularis is a very pretty fossil of a Jurassic pterosaur, which also reveals some interesting modes of evolution; modes that I daresay are indicative of significant processes in development, although this work is not a developmental study (I wish…having some pterosaur embryos would be exciting). Here it is, one gorgeous animal.
(Click for larger image)Figure 2. Holotype ZMNH M8782 (a,b,e) and referred specimen YH-2000 ( f ) of D. modularis gen. et sp. nov.: (a) cranium and mandibles in the right lateral view,…